ideal is a continual oscillation from one plane to the other, a restless
alternative of intuitive concentration and conceptual expansion. But
our idleness takes exception to this, for the feeling of effort appears
precisely in the traject from the dynamic scheme to the images and
concepts, in the passing from one plane of thought to another.

Thus the natural tendency is to remain in the last of these planes, that
of language. We know what dangers threaten us there.

Suppose we have some idea or other and the word representing it. Do not
suppose that to this word there is one corresponding sense only, nor
even a finished group of various distinct and rigorously separable
senses. On the contrary, there is a whole scale corresponding, a
complete continuous spectrum of unstable meanings which tend unceasingly
to resolve into one another. Dictionaries attempt to illuminate them.
The task is impossible. They co-ordinate a few guiding marks; but who
shall say what infinite transitions underlie them?

A word designates rather a current of thought than one or several halts
on a logical path. Here again a dynamic continuity exists previous
to the parcelling out of the acceptations. What, then, should be the
attitude of the mind?

A supple moving attitude more attentive to the curve of change than to
the possible halting-points along the road. But this is not the case at
all; the effort would be too great, and what happens, on the contrary,
is this. For the spectrum a chromatic scale of uniform tints is very
quickly substituted. This is in itself an undesirable simplification,
for it is impossible to reconstitute the infinity of real shades by
combinations of fundamental colours each representing the homogeneous
shore, which each region of the spectrum finally becomes.

However cleverly we proportion these averages, we get, at most, some
vulgar counterfeit: orange, for example, is not a mixture of yellow
and red, although this mixture may recall to those who have known it
elsewhere the simple and original sensation of orange. Again, a second
simplification, still more undesirable, succeeds the first.

There are no longer any colours at all; black lines serve as
guide-marks. We are therefore with pure concepts decidedly in full
symbolism. And it is with symbols that we shall henceforward be trying
to reconstruct reality.

I need not go back to the general characteristics or the inconveniences
of this method. Concepts resemb